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RE: menu attribute granularity


From: Thomas Dickey
Subject: RE: menu attribute granularity
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2007 18:46:42 -0400 (EDT)

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Jürgen Pfeifer wrote:

SVR4 has libform and libmenu. Maybe compatibility with them is still desirable?

yes - also NetBSD.

I understood the question to be whether _adding_ an extension would break compatibility (rather than modifying an existing feature). I'm not sure how useful it would be, but it wouldn't break existing programs. (I don't see how the menu items _could_ be colored without integrating it into the library).

On the other hand, wrapping the header files to make structs opaque would break some programs. That's a different case - it would limit portability to those which use only the function interface rather than knowing specific details about the structs. In general that's rather limiting, but the tradeoff I have in mind is to produce a variant (like ncursesw) which can be compiled to add some threading support.

The existing public interfaces won't change (aren't supposed to).


Juergen

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Thomas Dickey
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2007 12:19 AM
To: Bryan Christ
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: menu attribute granularity

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Bryan Christ wrote:

Thomas,

Any chance that set_item_fore() / item_fore() and set_item_back() /
item_back() overrides would be accepted if i wrote them?  After all, pdcurses
does not have a menu lib to break compatibility with.

perhaps - I'd make it yet-another-configure option since it would change
the size of the ITEM struct (new fields would be on the end of course).

I've been thinking about adding the NCURSES_OPAQUE ifdef to the other
libraries, which would be useful for flushing out applications that use
the struct members directly.  One drawback is that there aren't defined
functions to do _all_ of the operations needed for the values (I used
one in demo_menus, iirc).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net


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Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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